Tunes, Pancakes, and Ike...oh my!

What started out as a semi-normal, uneventful weekend, definitely didn't end that way. But let's start at the beginning.

On Friday evening, Eric and I decided that the off-and-on rain was a little too unpredictable for our taste and instead of heading for the football game, we decided to check out Shake It! Records in Northside. We're big fans of independent bookstores like Joseph Beth and the Blue Manatee; independent coffeehouses like Pleasant Perk, Rohs Street, and Coffee Emporium; independent restaurants like Indigo, Arthurs, and Zips. So it's no wonder we're also big fans of independent music stores, like Everybody's Records, which is right up the street from us. Shake It! is another such place. And we're in love with it. The pros of Shake It!: Better selection of used and new music, other random stuff for sale (they have the hamburger phone like Juno has), and more of that High Fidelity feel. The con: they don't have the CD listening station where you can scan any CD barcode and listen to all of the tracks (not only do places like Barnes and Noble have these, but Everybody's Records does too). Shake It! picks about 30 different CDs to showcase at random listening stations throughout the store and that's it. But it's still a cool place, and all of you music lovers out there should check it out. Honey, another cool independent restaurant, is right down the street and very yummy should you need foodage while in Northside.

Anyway....we almost didn't get to go to Shake It! because Miss Cate was falling asleep after dinner- as evidenced by the video below. She woke up once she realized we were filming her though.



Cate got in on the tunes at Shake It! and zoned out a little.
On Saturday morning we made pancakes and with a little leftover batter, I made Cate one of her own.
She wasn't sure about it at first.
But ended up liking it and ate about a fourth of it before it became a gooey mess.
She has top teeth coming in and we know table foods are just around the corner. In fact, we try to let her taste as much of our food as possible.

On Sunday, Ike found us...yup, all the way here in Cincinnati. We didn't have much rain, but there were 80 mile/hour winds! Yikes! We lost power around 2:45 on Sunday and didn't get it back until about 3:45 on Monday. Eric was the hero of the day and official milk-saver. As many of you know, once Cate dropped a couple of feedings this summer (which correlated with her increating solid food feedings), I continued to pump. As a result, I had 90 bags of milk in our freezer so that I could stop pumping at school after Christmas and only pump in the mornings and evenings. There was no way we were going to lose that milk. So 3 hours into our power-outage, Eric went and got dry ice for our freezer. When it looked like it was going to be awhile...he threw all of it in a cooler along with some of our other groceries and we headed to his parents' house (they never lost power). We came back to our house Monday afternoon and when the power came back on, we opened the fridge and freezer to assess the damage on the stuff we left behind. Everything actually still felt cold and frozen stuff was still rock solid. Eric trekked back up to his parents' house to get the milk and other stuff (we left it there because we weren't sure if we'd have power when we returned to the house). All 90 bags made it! Eric is a hero.

Needless to say, I didn't have school on Monday. We had a two hour delay today since about half of my students and coworkers are still without power (and could be until this weekend). It's the same tomorrow.

So I'm enjoying my extra sleep and hang out time with the family. Here are some pictures I pilfered from cincinnati.com of the common sites around here.


~Melody :-)